


As It Comes

by chinuplilpup



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Gen, OCD, Trans Fero, where instead of being undergrads the characters mostly work there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-05-17 23:25:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14841204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chinuplilpup/pseuds/chinuplilpup
Summary: Lem moves in with Fero and he didn’t prepare enough for the first day of the new semester. At least he’s only T.A.ing one class full of undergrads who might grow to hate him.





	As It Comes

**Author's Note:**

> warning for mentions of shitty families and descriptions of OCD compulsions. this basically began as me going “what if lem king modern au where i could project my ocd onto him” 
> 
> also Lem is kind of an asshole but that’s unrelated and canon

The kitchen floor is tiled, which makes it worse. 

At Lem’s parents’ house the kitchen and bathrooms were smooth linoleum. It’s easier to close his eyes and not worry about the number of steps when he can’t feel grout under his feet. 

The tiles are about two square inches, so it’s literally impossible not to step on them. Fero suggested he wear shoes, but he can still feel himself stepping uneven and wrong. A rug would help. That’s something he and Fero both want, one of the few things Fero admits to having in common with his family, is a penchant for rugs on rugs on rugs.

That’s the plan but they haven’t had the money or honestly the time. They haven’t even really unpacked yet. Lem’s strategy for unpacking is to dig out things when he needs them. His backpack was in a cardboard box shoved underneath his bed, already full of all his school stuff from last semester. This morning he dumped it out—half-full notebooks and tattered folders and loose pens—found every broken or empty pen he owned, and shoved those back under his bed. 

There were nine useless pens. He touched his favorite black ballpoint pen three times for each of them, but that made twenty-seven times total and two plus seven equals nine, so, fuck. He touched the pen three more times to make it an even thirty—three is a good, round number—but the damage was already done. 

It’s not even 10 a.m. and Lem feels like he’s supposed to be doing something but he doesn’t know _what_ , so the world keeps closing in and closing in around him, and he has class in forty minutes. He’s hungry. He paces back and forth at the edge of where the carpet turns into tile for five minutes, and then leaves early. 

He takes seventeen steps down the stairs, and today’s so fucked up already that he walks back up them, unlocks and relocks the door, and starts again, making sure to count an even number of steps. The twenty minute walk to campus is calming. He puts in his headphones and the rest is routine. He knows the sidewalks here, knows how many steps to take between cracks. It feels right. 

It’s unfair to be angry about the apartment. It had been Fero’s plan long before Lem became a last minute part of it. It was all Fero’s tenacity and mostly Fero’s money for the down payment. 

Lem’s lucky that he has a place to run to while he gets his shit together. He’s grateful. Really. 

 

He gets on campus and immediately heads to the convenience store to grab something to eat before his first class. He comes out with a bagel and sees someone he knows sitting at a table.

“Hey, Devar.”

Devar jerks his chin in an effortless nod. He has a large coffee in front of him. He is so cool. 

“How’s your morning?” Devar asks. As Lem sits down, he takes the lid off and rips open sugar packets to dump into it, two or three packets at a time. Lem counts them. 

“Long already," Lem says.

“I hear you.” Devar empties the last of the sugar into his coffee and replaces the lid. Seven packets. 

“Yeah,” Lem says, and then he feels guilty. “Overall, though. Overall it’s been good.”

Devar salutes him with the coffee and drinks from it. Devar is great because he’s good at talking but sitting in silence with him doesn’t feel uncomfortable either. 

Lem doesn’t remember what Devar is studying. It’s something to do with music. He plays a ridiculous number of instruments and spends a lot of his time on campus coaching undergrads through playing one or another of them. His department and his schedule overlap enough with Lem’s that they’re friends by default. Maybe the history of music? 

Devar raises his eyebrows and his purple heart-shaped sunglasses fall to the bridge of his nose. “Don’t look now.”

Lem turns around. Emmanuel is walking through the student center. He’s new on campus, and Lem isn’t sure yet if he’s a student, or where he might work. Devar’s started basically a betting pool on his Twitter about where Emmanuel’s accent is from. It’s something European but north or south, east or west, everyone has a guess. 

Emmanuel is already looking over, and he waves a little, and smiles. Lem waves and turns back around. 

“Talk to him,” Devar says.

“No.”

“Talk to him.”

“No.” Not today, not today. Lem taps his finger on the table one two three, one, two, three, and keeps track of how many times he does it so he doesn’t stop on a multiple of nine. 

“Alright, man.” Devar takes another drink. “He’s gonna think you hate him.”

Lem shrugs uncomfortably. He and Emmanuel met under weird circumstances. Some of the people Lem hung out with hated some of the people Emmanuel hung out with, and if there was a fight—which, Lem isn’t saying there was a fight, per se—Lem hadn’t not participated, and Emmanuel had also not _not_ participated. Per se. 

So it’s weird trying to build a relationship off that. He wants to but he isn’t sure if Emmanuel does and he isn’t sure if Emmanuel knows that _he_ does, and— 

It’s very reminiscent of high school. Or at least the relationship drama he watched his friends get up to in high school while he sat on the sidelines and wondered what he was missing that made everyone else care so much about who they went to prom with. 

Fero, who heard Lem’s winding prose poetry about Emmanuel for days before Lem even knew Emmanuel’s name, had flushed and rolled his eyes at that. “Fucking tell me about it,” he’d said, and decided to go to bed ten minutes later.

Lem frowns at his phone. Fero probably won’t take his fifteen for another half hour at least, so texting him before class starts is no good. 

He pockets his phone, says bye to Devar, and goes to his seat at the front of the lecture hall. 

 

Lem has half an hour after the lecture ends to loiter around before he has to book it across campus to the tiny building where he leads a discussion section. He ducks into the parking lot behind the lecture hall to smoke.

He’s half-leaning half-sitting on a railing and looking at nothing in particular when he spots Hella leaving the athletics building across the lot. He waves when she gets closer.

“Spare one?” she asks, nodding to his cigarette. 

The pack has ten left. It’s fine. Lem will just smoke a second one. It’ll be fine. “Sure, yeah. Here.”

Hella has her own lighter. She leans casually against the railing and looks back towards campus. She is okay with long silences, and with her it makes Lem extremely nervous. 

“How’s, um,” Lem gulps as Hella looks over at him, “things?”

“Fine,” she says. The more outwardly scared Lem is of her, the shorter she is with him. The best interaction he ever had with her was when they ran into each other off-campus, Lem was a little high, and he went on a rant about telegraphs. He is not under the impression that she actually cares about the difference between American and continental morse code—mostly her interests are like, sports and fishing—but Fero corroborated that she had smiled at Lem. Fero had been high too. Hella called them a cab home and dumped them both into it. “How’s your boy?” 

“Who?” Lem takes a second to realize she means Emmanuel. He’s like, ninety percent sure Hella knows his name and is messing with him. Maybe not. “Oh. He’s around.”

“Talked to him yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Huh.” 

Lem wracks his mind for something to ask her about her life and comes up empty. They smoke in silence until Hella has to head back to work. She’s the head of the athletics department, which seems like it entails one part office work like paperwork and phone calls, two parts coordinating and attending sports games, and two parts wrangling a small army of student workers who always seem to be losing the keys for stuff like sheds and bathrooms. 

“Bye,” Lem calls. 

Hella hums and she’s off her break, heading back across the parking lot. Lem wishes for her effortless cool and, sometimes, for her distance from academia. He did choose this life—no one trips accidentally into a PhD program, at least Lem King didn’t—but it’s the beginning of the semester and he already wants a break.

The second cigarette makes Lem a few minutes late to discussion, but it’s the first day and he thinks the students will forgive him. He hopes so, anyway.

 

He ends discussion ten minutes early because it’s clear no one has done any reading yet and even Lem only skimmed the abstracts of the articles and the chapter titles of the main textbook. He walks with purpose from the building and none of the students try to catch up and talk to him. Lem ducks into an alcove with a sigh of relief, texts Fero “hey you ok,” and stares at his phone for the twelve minutes it takes for Fero to reply with a pigeon emoji and a check mark. Then a second later, “;)”. 

Lem’s too relieved not to reply with three of the solid black hearts. He runs a little late to his meeting with his advisor, but that’s fine. That’s the last thing he has to do today. He rushes into Samol’s office, wrestles the strap of his bag over his head, and drops into a chair. 

Samol’s office is like an extension of him. He’s been at the college since its founding, before the building his office is in was built. Everything from the rug on the floor to the chairs and the curtains come in shades of brown and green. Even a lot of the books on the shelves that line every wall seem to follow the color scheme: earthy and bright at the same time, grounded and full of spikes of joy. The mess of books and papers and little figurines and objects that line the shelves and his desk seem somehow deliberate, like everything has its rightful place in all the clutter. His guitar sits on a stand in the corner, in easy reach from his desk. 

Right next to his computer is a framed picture of his grandson. Seeing that picture is always kind of a shock because of how much he looks like both of his dads; Samol’s son Samothes, who Lem knows very little about except that he is rich, apparently a genius, and that the building they’re in is named after him, and Samot, who Lem T.A.’d for his very first semester here and is just as eccentric as Lem would expect from the husband of a genius recluse architect. He’s soft-spoken and easily demands to be heard in every lecture or conversation, and Lem is still terrified of him. 

Samol, sitting at his desk, looks tired. He’s been more and more so lately, and it looks like he’s lost weight since Lem last saw him. He asks, “How’s it going?”

Lem’s tongue feels too big in his mouth, as it usually does with Samol. He hasn’t sent in the pages he was supposed to email Samol last weekend. He doesn’t have the pages, and if Samol asks about them Lem might cry and force Samol to convince him not to drop out of the program, again. “I just moved to an apartment so it’s been—hectic.”

“Mhm,” Samol hums. “How’s your energy for this semester?”

Lem screws up his mouth. “It’s fine.”

Lem knows Samol thinks he should register with the disability services center on campus. He’s pushed the topic a few times gently, but Lem really doesn’t want to go through the trouble. Accommodations aren’t a limited resource but he knows he’d just feel guilty about it and that would probably make everything worse. 

Plus the process of registering sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare involving first getting a diagnosis. Some primal left-over high school fear puts him off the idea of going to a therapist, as if his parents will get some sort of alert the second he makes the call or walks in the door, even though he has his own insurance now through the school. 

Anyway it seems like a lot of work for not much short-term benefit and he’s doing fine. He appreciates the thought but he’s fine. 

Samol doesn’t seem to have any idea about the thought spiral Lem is going on. He taps a thin finger on his desk—Lem counts, five times—and says, a little distantly, “We can only take each day as it comes.”

 

He’s ready to text Fero again as soon as he counts sixteen steps up the stairs to the apartment, but Fero’s already there, sprawled out on the couch. Lem locks the door and takes off his shoes. The apartment is small and the stupid tile of the kitchen is just a few steps to his left. He doesn’t have to go there unless he is dying for something from the fridge, but it’s there. Just there, looming. 

Lem focuses on Fero. “You awake?”

Fero shifts. “No.”

Lem takes his hand and bounces their palms together. 

“‘S it your back?”

Fero squirms to the side a little bit and a series of massive pops and cracks travel up his spine. “Nah, I’m good.”

He tugs at Lem’s hand. Lem resists for a second. “Your binder.” It messes up Fero’s back if he wears it more than five or six straight hours.

Fero huffs. “It’s off.” 

Lem lets himself be pulled down onto the couch. He puts his head on Fero’s stomach and settles his weight between Fero’s legs. 

“How was your day?” Fero asks.

Lem takes a deep breath and hums on the exhale. He can feel himself relax in increments. “How was work?”

“Eh.” 

“How are the hamsters?” 

Yesterday one of Fero’s coworkers at the pet shop where he works spilled the hamsters’ water bottle into the cage. They got the hamsters all dried off and gave them new bedding, but Fero was still a little worried. 

“They’re good. Running around in their little wheel and everything.”

“Really?”

“No.” Fero laughs. “Well, one of them was. The other one’s super lazy. If she was running I’d be like, what the fuck? Is she okay?”

“Oh,” Lem says. “But they’re not sick?”

“No, thank god.” Fero leans his phone against the top of Lem’s head. Lem mumbles a protest, but he doesn’t move to dislodge it. 

“Shh,” Fero says, “if you want some of this pizza.” 

Lem can feel Fero typing on his phone. He laughs because this is comfortable, lying on the couch while Fero orders food.

Fero huffs again. “I swear to god I will eat both of them myself.” 

He would, too. Lem doesn’t say anything but he sighs. Fero steadies his phone when it slips from the crown of Lem’s head. He pokes Lem’s shoulder. “Also I put pineapples on them.”

He wouldn’t. “Hey.”

Fero laughs. Lem looks up and rests his chin on Fero’s sternum. “Wait, did you really?”

Fero keeps laughing. Lem figures he’ll find out once the pizzas arrive. He can pick off some pineapples. He lays his head back down, Fero’s stomach still shaking under his cheek. It’ll be fine.


End file.
